


Visitation

by schizoauthoress



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Hallucinations, Mental Instability, description of corpses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-11-15 09:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20863709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schizoauthoress/pseuds/schizoauthoress
Summary: visitation, noun: "the administration of comfort or aid,orof affliction or punishment."Kane does a foolish thing, trying to pretend. And his mind punishes him for it.[Once again, I do NOT take prompts in the comments, especially explicit ones, so don't even type them here. There's an email address in my profile, or my Tumblr askbox (same username) if you want to be anonymous.]





	Visitation

"You haven't been taking your medication."

Kane sighed, feeling as though a hard knot in his chest had finally loosened. He gazed out into the dark, at the indistinct hulks of machinery in the boiler room, and waited. Sometimes she obeyed the rules, and it would be the same as another person being brave enough to seek him out.

Kane felt a weight against his right side, as though some unseen someone had taken a seat on his blind side and leaned into him. It wasn't quite the same as before, but it was close enough to be a comfort.

"You know you should, Kane."

_I know,_ he couldn't make himself say. He heard that familiar sigh -- the one she always made when she was trying not to laugh.

"Oh, sweetheart," Katie said, a little sadly, "you need to take better care of yourself. Especially when I'm not around."

Kane winced at the reminder. It was just his memory stitching together things she'd said and done before, but it still hurt. She wasn't ever going to come around again. She wasn't really here.

Katie Vick wasn't anywhere, because she was dead.

Still, he lifted his right arm and felt the empty air as if she could be found and pulled closer. His broken mind obliged, in a way -- he felt Katie's hand pressed to the scars surrounding his right eye, as though she were cradling his cheek in her palm.

It was impossible, not only because she was dead, but because he was wearing his mask. But... she'd touched him like that almost every time she was about to give him a kiss. He missed it. He missed her.

Kane closed his eyes. His throat refused to cooperate, but his lips formed her name. A silent supplication -- the unvoiced longing of a broken heart.

"Does it hurt?" another voice, harsh with hate, hissed at Kane in his mind, "I hope it hurts!"

That opened the floodgates of memory, and voices crowded in, screaming old insults and vitriol.

"Freak! Monster! Murderer! Psycho!"

Kane tried to get to his feet. He might know, in his rational mind, that this wasn't real and hallucinations couldn't actually hurt him... but his rational mind wasn't exactly in control right now. Kane had been sitting on the floor long enough to impede blood flow, and now he stumbled on protesting, prickling feet. His breath sounded too loud, reflected back at him by the mask. Kane never had trouble breathing through the mask's small mouth slit, even in the ring. But he felt like the mask was suffocating him now, and clawed through his tangled curls for the buckles that secured it to his face. Something in the HVAC system fired up, but even that racket did nothing to drown out the howling and screaming in his head.

It felt like ages before the leather straps loosened and Kane could pull the mask from his face. Tiny twinges of pain danced along his scalp --- no doubt some of his hair was twisted up in the metal rivets of the mask, ripping out as he rushed the removal. He couldn't care.

Kane sucked in huge lungfuls of air, trying to focus on the real sounds of the boiler room. He felt like an idiot. A few moments pretending he hadn't fucked up like always, hadn't gotten Katie killed... was it worth this?

(_yes god yes of course_, something wailed in his mind)

Eventually, Kane became aware of the silence once more -- no machines growled in the dark, and no voices that weren't there hurled abuse at him -- his own breathing was the only sound.

He moved for one of the walls, leaning against it as he raked his free hand into his hair. He really ought to put his mask back on. He really ought to go back upstairs, to the men's locker room. He really ought to go digging into his bag for the prescription bottles he'd carelessly tossed in at the beginning of the month.

And yet... he lingered.

Kane found himself moving back toward the main door, the stairwell beyond it. Fluorescent light streamed in from the narrow slit window in the door, crosshatched with shadow from the wire mesh inlaid in the glass. It illuminated the bowed head of someone seated -- slumped -- against the door. Kane stopped.

It could have been almost anyone -- average height, average build, unremarkable brown hair of shoulder length -- but he knew it wasn't. There was blood, red going black, in that hair. And there was still no breathing but his own.

Sudden as a filmstrip jumping a few frames, and Katie's head was lolled back at an unnatural angle, neck clearly broken and blood streaming from a ruined temple.

(her blood on the windshield, a red splatter that meant death and failure and carelessness)

Her brown eyes were fixed straight ahead, staring at nothing. Just after the accident, they'd been staring right into him. He'd looked into her eyes, refused to look away, until they reflected the shifting red and white lights of the emergency vehicles. He'd begged her, silently, to move -- to breathe, to blink, to give any kind of sign that she wasn't dead. She hadn't.

But this time, Katie blinked. This time, her eyes shifted from the middle distance and looked up, up into Kane's face. She smiled, and dark purge fluid spilled from her mouth, seeming to spread rot to the rest of her. Katie Vick, as she would be in her grave. She spoke, in a crackling rasp,

"Sweetheart."

*-*-*-*-*


End file.
